Fellow Amers:

I’ve just upgraded to 15c from 14 on my Vista system and seem to be having a problem with the select tool. If I attempt to select a box worth of CPs (model mode or any other) the interior of the selection box that I create over paints then model, background and interface with the color grey. Once the selection is made (i.e. I let go of the mouse button) the grey disappears and its back to normal but it makes very difficult to select what I want when its blocked from my view while selecting. I have similar problems with the other 2 selection tools. The free form selection tool greys out small blocks of varying sizes that follow the path of the mouse. Thinking it was a driver issue I upgraded the display drivers. Unfortunately this did not help. Is this a known issue or is it just me?

Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide.

P.S My apologies if this has been asked before, the site search engine does not permit searching on the phrase :”XP” because its only 2 characters long.

Its been quite awhile since I've seen that.
Way back in v11 there was a similar issue with some graphics cards and maximized windows.
When they weren't maximized in A:M they rendered right.
As I recall with v12 (and moving into Win XP) the issue went away.

If you change from OpenGL to Direct3D or vice versa in TOOLS/OPTIONS does that make a difference?

Regretably unmaximized windows and changing back and forth between OpenGL to Direct3D didn't work. This is really bad because the program is effectively unsuable for me at this point

I suspect it is somehow a graphics card problem but since it didn't happen in V14 and does in V15 there must be some A:M part of it too.

-send a report to www.hash.com/reports and include a screencaps showing the difference between your V14 result and your V15 result.

-Try V15b temporarily

-the driver for a video card usually has a number of tweak settings with odd names. Experiment with switching those. Try setting everything to its lowest or OFF setting. You may have to restart A:M or reboot for driver setting changes to take effect.

Thanks for the additional pointers I'll try them out. Also I may have given the wrong impression, I have been away from AM for a while but I had this same problem in version 14, which is why I upgraded to 15 hoping that the new version fixed it. I think you're right though that its a Driver problem. I hope I can find the right combination of bits to flip in order to get it to work.

Do you have an NVidia graphic card? How old is it? I read somewhere that older NVidia cards (older than a year or two) have some problems with AM, but the newer cards don't. Just a guess. I've never used AM with a new NVidia card.

Not cards but only the driver... a new driver may solve the problem.
*Fuchur*

The card is a NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT and according to Vista's driver update handling SW it has the latest patch.

Also... in my windows control panel for "display" there's a tab for "settings" which has an "advanced" button which brings up another tab for "trouble shooting" that has one slider for "Hardware acceleration". Try setting that to lower levels.

Well after turning off every option on the card's config page and setting 3D stuff for max performance over max quality, performing reboots and program restarts I'm still plagued with grey CP selection boxes. Now that I've played with it a bit more, it appears that what is doing is cutting a hole thru the current window to what is behind. I.e. if there is no other window open behind it takes the background color of the application (grey). If there is a open window behind it takes on the colors of that window area defined by the selection box. Weird huh!

Any other suggestions (short of buying a new computer)?

right-click on the A:M shortcut or program icon, choose properties, make sure "enable desktop composition" is NOT checked-

Perhaps there may be a difference in options depending on what version of Vista you are using?

My options have 'Disable desktop composition'.

At any rate... thats the setting Steve is referring to.

I tested on my end and both check and not checked A:M seems to operate the same. Perhaps just a bit snappier with the setting off. I haven't tested extensively so your results may vary.

windows usually has a poor grasp of the latest video drivers.

visit your video card vendor's site directly and grab the latest driver.

...unless you're on a notebook, then grab that vendor's latest driver.

-jon

So after making several byte donations to the gods of Vista configuration as well as the planets lining up, the Oracle's of wisdom have led me to the see the light. AM now works properly. What was it you ask? Disabling the desktop composition. In my version of Vista you have to check the box to turn it off. Thanks everyone for all of your suggestions! And happy animating?

Pixmite

I don't know if this is related, but I began a model in 15c on an XP installation. The CPs of everything but the last group I was editing became un-selectable. I exported the model and imported it to my Vista64 installation of 15c to no avail. Model attached.Click to view attachment

You have locked all cp's except cp's in the ligature group .

thank you - goes to show I don't spend enough time with the technical reference.